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Overview

Keenly observed and irresistibly funny, My Salinger Year is a memoir about literary New York in the late nineties, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing.

After leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. Precariously balanced between poverty and glamour, she spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office—where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and agents doze after three-martini lunches—and then goes home to her threadbare Brooklyn apartment and her socialist boyfriend. Rakoff is tasked with processing Salinger’s voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agency’s form response and impulsively begins writing back. The results are both humorous and moving, as Rakoff, while acting as the great writer’s voice, begins to discover her own.

Product Details

About the Author

Joanna Rakoff’s novel A Fortunate Age won the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers and the Elle Readers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle best seller. She has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, and other publications. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

How many times had I been told that Salinger would not call, would never call, that I would have no contact with him? More than I could count.

And yet one morning, a Friday, at the beginning of April, I picked up the phone and heard someone shouting at me. “HELLO? HELLO?” Then something incomprehensible. “HELLO? HELLO?” More gibberish. Slowly, as in a dream, the gibberish resolved into language. “It’s Jerry,” the caller was shouting. Oh my God, I thought. It’s him. I began, slightly, to quiver with fear, not because I was talking to—or being shouted at by—the actual J. D. Salinger, but because I so feared doing something wrong and incurring my boss’s wrath. My mind began to sift through all the Salinger-related instructions that had been imparted to me, but they had more to do with keeping others away from him, less to do with the man himself. There was no risk of my asking him to read my stories or gushing about The Catcher in the Rye. I still hadn’t read it. “WHO IS THIS?” he asked, though it took me a few tries to understand. “It’s Joanna,” I told him, nine or ten times, yelling at the top of my lungs by the final three. “I’m the new assistant.”

“Well, nice to meet you, Suzanne,” he said, finally, in something akin to a normal voice. “I’m calling to speak to your boss.” I had assumed as much. Why had Pam put him through to me, rather than taking a message? My boss was out for the day, it being Friday, her reading day.

I conveyed this to him, or hoped that I did. “I can call her at home and have her call you back today. Or she can give you a call when she gets in on Monday.”

“Monday is fine,” he said, his voice ratcheted down another notch. “Well, very nice to meet you, Suzanne. I hope we meet in person someday.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Have a great day.” This was not a phrase I ever used. Where had it come from?

“YOU, TOO!” Ah, the shouting.

I put the phone down and took a deep breath, as I’d learned to do in ballet. My entire body, I realized, was shaking. I stood up and stretched.

“Jerry?” asked Hugh, stepping out of his office with a mug of coffee.

“Yes!” I said. “Wow.”

“He’s deaf. His wife set up this special phone for him, with an amplified receiver, but he refuses to use it.” He sighed his trademark sigh. To be Hugh was to be let down by the world. “What did he want?”

“Just to talk to my boss.” I shrugged. “I offered to call her at home and have her call him back, but he said Monday was fine.”

Hugh wrinkled his face in thought. “Hmm, why don’t you call her anyway. I think she’d want to know.”

“Okay,” I said, thumbing through my Rolodex.

She wasn’t home and had no answering machine. She didn’t believe in them. Just as she didn’t believe in computers or voice mail, another newfangled invention not employed by the Agency. If you called during business hours, you reached Pam, the receptionist. If you called outside business hours, the phone just rang and rang, as it did at my boss’s apartment, twenty blocks north of the office. I tried again, every hour or so, until the end of the day, to no avail. It would have to be Monday.

Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of My Salinger Year,Joanna Rakoff’s acclaimed memoir of literary New York in the late nineties.

1. In what ways does Joanna Rakoff’s position at the Agency seem typical of many young people’s first post-college jobs? Has it gotten harder or easier for young people to start a meaningful career since then?

2. How much did Rakoff’s experience at the Agency match what she had imagined ahead of time about the glamorous world of publishing? Was her disillusionment inevitable?

3. When the book begins, Rakoff has just left her college boyfriend, even though it’s clear she’s still in love with him. She says she doesn’t understand why she did this. Is there anything in her behavior or situation that might shed light on her motives?

4. Rakoff’s boyfriend, Don, is a rather unpleasant character. Why does she stay with him as long as she does? Is there something universal about her experience with Don?

5. Rakoff never names the firm for which she works—calling it “the Agency”—nor does she name her boss or her college boyfriend. Why do you think she made this choice? Does it matter that she’s concealed the names? Would the memoir have more impact if the names were revealed?

6. Midway through the book, Rakoff’s father presents her with a stack of bills, revealing that he had taken out student loans in her name without her knowledge, forging her signature on the applications. He tells her the payments are her responsibility now, even though he knows she doesn’t make enough to cover them. Was this a good way to encourage financial responsibility? Should she have protested her father’s actions more strongly?

7. Part of the book’s plot line revolves around Rakoff and her closest friend, Jenny, growing apart. Jenny has chosen a more conservative path in life; Rakoff, a more bohemian one. Is growing apart from one’s childhood friends a universal part of growing up?

8. When Rakoff is asked to read Judy Blume’s new novel for adults, she recalls the important role Blume’s children’s books had played in her life as a young book lover. By contrast, she had never read J. D. Salinger before. Do you think Blume has the same sort of significant place in many young women’s hearts as Salinger does for many young men?

9. The Agency is almost a character in the book itself. How would you describe its personality? How important are the particular quirks of the place and of her boss to Rakoff’s development during this year?

10. Rakoff’s memoir is set at the dawn of digital technology. How does her employer’s resistance to using computers and insistence on using outdated Selectric typewriters and Dictaphones contribute to the strangeness of Rakoff’s experience working there? How differently might this story have played out if it had occurred a decade later, when email and the internet were more inescapable?

11. A turning point in the story comes when Rakoff decides to disregard her boss’s instructions to send out a form letter on Salinger’s behalf, and begins answering fans’ letters instead. Was this courageous or recklessly irresponsible? Why do you think she did it? What effect does it have on her?

12. What do the letters that Rakoff writes to Salinger’s adoring fans show us about her? To what extent is she writing them for herself?

13. J. D. Salinger was famously reclusive. What did you know about him before reading this book, and did any of his cameo appearances in the book change your image of him?

14. What sort of influence does Rakoff’s boyfriend have on her during this period of her life? What relationship do his literary ambitions have to her own? To what extent is finding her voice connected with breaking away from him?

15. What does it mean to Rakoff when Salinger dies? After reading the memoir, how would you explain her decision to entitle it My Salinger Year?

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My Salinger Year

Editorial Reviews

02/24/2014Rakoff’s second book (after A Fortunate Age) is a reflective account of her experiences working in publishing during the mid-1990s, a time when key players in the industry were adjusting to many technological advancements, as well as a unique look at the often misunderstood J.D. Salinger. Having moved back to New York after earning a master’s at a London graduate school, Rakoff takes a low-paying secretarial job at a respected but old-fashioned literary agency (she wrote in a Slate article that it was Harold Ober Associates) that represented high-profile authors such as Judy Bloom and Salinger among others who remain unnamed. Ending her relationship with her “college boyfriend,” Rakoff rented a run-down apartment in the burgeoning but not-yet-gentrified Williamsburg with her new boyfriend, the anti-establishment Don, who spent his time working on his novel while she was away at the office. When an editor from a small press expressed interest in publishing one of Salinger’s minor and nearly forgotten stories, Rakoff began an ongoing correspondence with Salinger, and formed a tender connection with the man that prompted her to read his work, beginning a late-bloomer’s love of an elusive writer. This is a vibrant coming-of-age memoir that moves along with momentum and energy, and one only wishes Rakoff had spent more than one year with Salinger so we’d have an even fuller portrait of a man who was and is often misunderstood. (June)

Publishers Weekly

2014-05-06A sharply observed coming-of-age memoir about an aspiring writer's entry-level job at a fading literary agency.Though Rakoff earned acclaim for her debut novel (A Fortunate Age, 2009), her memoir is more engaging, particularly for its mastery of tone. The author establishes herself as something of an innocent, a master's grad who wanted to write poetry but required a job to tide her over. She found one at an unnamed literary agency that continued to operate with typewriters and fax machines and where her boss's main responsibility was the nonbusiness of J.D. Salinger. It would be easy for a satiric hipster to have satirical fun with the material—particularly with the onslaught of letters from generations of Salinger fans who actually expected (or even demanded) a response—but Rakoff isn't that sort of author. She reserves just the slightest bit of judgmental irony for herself and for her boyfriend, a socialist, boxer and aspiring novelist. Her family recognized that she was a glorified secretary at a menial job that would bring her no closer to fulfilling her literary ambitions and didn't provide her with sufficient salary to pay her bills. Against her boss's admonitions, she developed something of a telephone relationship with Salinger (whom she'd never read before taking the job), finding him "never anything but kind and patient. More so than plenty of people who called the Agency. More so than plenty of his fans." Eventually, Rakoff fell in love with his books, established correspondence with some who wrote him (and learned why a form letter was previously the standard response), assumed more responsibility as a manuscript reader and something of an agent herself, and left the agency as a published poet.Many of the mysteries of the literary world remain mysteries to the author, but she provides good company as she explores them.

Kirkus Reviews

“A beautifully written tribute to the way things were at the edge of the digital revolution, and to the evergreen power of literature.” —Chicago Tribune

“The loneliness of life after college [is] perfectly explained . . . There’s something Salingeresque about her book: it’s a vivid story of innocence lost.” —Entertainment Weekly

“My Salinger Year describes its author’s trip down a metaphorical rabbit hole back in 1996. She arrived not in Wonderland, but a place something like it, a New York City firm she calls only the Agency. . . . An outright tribute to the enduring power of J.D. Salinger’s work.” —Salon

“A breezy memoir of being a ‘bright young assistant’ in the mid-1990s . . . Salinger himself makes a cameo appearance. . . . The ‘archaic charms’ of the Agency are comically offset by its refusal to acknowledge the Internet age.” —The New York Times Book Review

“While it may be the Salinger cameo that initially draws readers in, it’s Rakoff’s effortlessly elegant, unhyperbolic prose and poignant coming-of-age story that will keep them engrossed through the very last word.” —BookPage

“Moving. . . . Heartfelt. . . . Rakoff uses Salinger—his fan mail and her favorite character, Franny—to help illuminate her inner life. . . . The memoir is touching, and it’s easy to empathize with how Rakoff, like Franny, is ‘trying to figure out how to live in this world.’” —USA Today

“Gentle, funny, closely observed. . . . The special unworldliness of the young literary person, who has reached adulthood without ever knowing or caring much about how the world works, is the real subject of My Salinger Year.” —Tablet Magazine

“Gripping and funny. . . . An involving, evocative tale that will have bookish women everywhere shuddering in recognition. Like Rona Jaffe’s novel of the 50s, The Best of Everything, it is concerned with what it feels like to move to the big city, to take on your first job, and to struggle to survive on a tiny salary when all the while your dreams are seemingly being snuffed out at every turn, and your love life is spiraling into muddle and mayhem. . . . So raw and so true.” —The Guardian

“As memoirs go, this is possibly one of the year’s funniest, enthralling and entertaining . . . For an insight into old-fashioned publishing this must be hard to beat. Everyone smokes, returns tiddly from boozy lunches, and authors are treated with respect. It knocks spots off The Devil Wears Prada.” —The Sydney Morning Herald

“Lures you in. . . . A story about growing up and getting better in a rapidly changing industry and world.” —Flavorwire, “June 2014 Books You Must Read”

From the Publisher

03/15/2014Following her debut novel, A Fortunate Age, Rakoff returns with a debut memoir. It's the early Nineties, and Rakoff, disenchanted with her graduate studies in London, decides she would rather write poetry than analyze it. Chasing this ambition, she flees to New York City and tries to make ends meet by working as a temp at a literary agency. The agency, although frozen in the time of chain-smoking bosses and Selectric typewriters, represents a long list of celebrated clients, including J.D. Salinger himself. Rakoff, who has not actually read any of Salinger's novels, finds herself swimming in Salinger fan mail and typing—on an actual typewriter—responses on the reclusive writer's behalf. Meanwhile, at home, she struggles to keep warm, let alone pursue her literary aspirations. She shares her crumbling Brooklyn apartment with her dubious boyfriend, Don, a competing writer. VERDICT This honest, introspective, and completely compelling story is sure to appeal to readers who are obsessed with the enigmatic Salinger, but it is intended for those who have experienced (or are experiencing) their own bluesy, confused, post-college Salinger Year. Rakoff is a careful observer and endearingly human. Her coming-of-age story is a gentle reminder that we are all, still, coming of age. [See Prepub Alert, 1/6/14.]—Meagan Lacy, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ. Indianapolis Libs.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

This selection was for one of the book clubs I’m in, and not normally something I would choose to read. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, and I’ve never read anything by Salinger. Gasp! Maybe one day….
The setting of the place she works at is stuck in the 1950’s, with the dictaphones and typewriters. At first I thought it was the 50’s, until I read that it was actually the mid 90’s. The Agency (and yes, that’s how Rakoff speaks of it), does not send Salinger any of the fan letters that he receives, and one of her jobs is to send a standard form letter. She starts to actually reply to some of the letters, letting them know Salinger can’t, but here’s her words of wisdom.
There is not much about Salinger in this book, it’s about Joanna Rakoff, who comes from a well off family, and lives in New York trying her hand at becoming a published poet. While the clients at The Agency are being wined and dined, she’s living in an apartment that doesn’t have heat, in the winter, in New York. But she wants to live the dream so she continues to be with a man who she was fascinated by at first, but then slowly realizes he’s using her for the small amount of money she has.
Rakoff loses the friends she had in college, and realizes the people she thought were her current friends, have many issues. Her parents stop paying her credit cards and student loans, so the lifestyle she led of going out for drinks and dinners, starts to decrease. Basically her life is like the millions of people who are on their own, don’t have parents to pay their way, and only find low paying jobs.
She makes it work, like so many other people are forced to do everyday. But the big difference is she has her parents to fall back on, if she really needs to. By the end of the book, she’s talked to Salinger on the phone a bunch of times, and once in person. And she’s made contacts in The Agency, and is able to start getting some of her work published.
This memoir was okay. Nothing super exciting happened, and I wonder if she hadn’t had some contact with Salinger, if this book would have even been published. Perhaps if you enjoy her poetry, and want to know a bit more about her, I would say go for it.

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